Finally one big battlegroup! Not having to make teams to farm the first boring 1k rating is going to be sweeeet as well not to mention the que times getting nerfed! Though I really dislike how people are going to be able to view your win/loss stats by simply inspecting your rating. Now people might be afraid of playing for fun with friends who arent very high rated since they might have a harder time finding real teammates once they want to aim high. Really good patch though thanks Blizzard :)

Yeah, i miss the teamnames but the patch is still going to be really good.

We understand that there are some players that will miss the customization and comradeship that came with arena teams. We're looking into ways in which we will be able to retain these particular feelings in arena after these changes occur, but at this time we don't have anything to share in this regard.

I wonder how the ladders will look now. Players with highest ratings etc? I hope they thought this through thoroughly.

The ladders will show individual players and their rankings will be based off of their personal rating. End of season rewards will still be awarded in the same manner as they are now, to the top "X"% of competitors, the percentage of course being different depending on the reward.

So it's all 100% individual? If I play with a team to 2600 and one of my teammates ends on 2560 and cutoff is 2570 he wont get a reward?

Well, while you may play with a few specific players and you consider yourselves a team, you're not actually in a set team. This means that your teammate wouldn't receive the title because he is playing with you. The reason for this is as there are no teams in 5.4, you could also simply feed the title to anyone else that you wanted who was just under the cut-off if the system worked as you said.

I feel that I need to clarify on my last post as there was some misunderstanding of what I meant. I was not promoting win trading, nor was I saying that you will be able to feed your end of season rewards to others. I wanted to point out that if the system worked as Easydragon questioned, then you could feed your rewards to others if they were just under the cut-off because there are no set teams. Don't worry as you won't be able to feed the title to others by playing with them, the rewards are based off of your own personal ratings alone.

I apologize for any confusion my post may have caused, I have now rephrased it to clarify the above points.

No, it's still a team challenge to attain rating as you will be playing as a team to defeat your opponents. The only difference is that the rewards will be granted at a personal level, rather than a team one.

With this system, and how the wow community is nowadays, why would I even want to play with my friends I might lose with?

If you’re afraid to play rated games with your friends because you don't want to lose matches or rating, then I'm afraid that there is not a lot that can be done to help you with that. The possible losses caused by playing with lesser skilled friends is the same as now though, if you leave your current team to play with some friends and you end up losing, your MMR will drop, which is the key number that matters and influences the way your personal and team ratings change.

If you want to play with friends without a fear of losing rating in the process, then I would recommend playing wargames. We're also looking into bringing back skirmish arenas which will help in this regard, but sadly we have no date set for when they will return.

how do YOU think that community will act towards a person who got twice as much losses than wins in arena

It won't be much different to how it is now for finding partners. If you’re a 1500 player, then generally you're going to greatly struggle finding a 2400+ team that is likely to take you on. Same goes for in 5.4, with a personal rating of 1500 and low win rate you're going to be looking for people with similar ratings or stats. If you're aiming to get partners above your personal level, it won't be easy, finding partners that are around your level and improving yourself with them is the best way to get teammates.

But people still fear that the arena ladders will look more like the RBG ladder after 5.4.

I think everyone is worried about that..

Just going to address this concern here; for those that queue with people who have a low ratings to fight weaker opponents, the players with higher ratings won't get much, if anything, out of those matches. This is because their own personal ratings are above their teams and opponents average.

Additionally, almost all rating exploits in the past have involved some sort of win trading or a loophole in the system itself. We've plugged up any of the loopholes that we've encountered, and due to the higher volume of players in the Arena pool that will be created from the region-wide matchmaking, there will be significantly less opportunity for win trading.

Why don't you create a system that enables you to lock your personal rating, you won't gain or lose any rating for as long as you have this option up. The matches would be given acording to your current rating, it would create a "phantom" rating depending on your win/losses while that option is on so that matches would still be delivered and matched balanced on the teams overall PR.

The problem with such a system is that you could lock your ratings and then intentionally go up against an opponent to lose and feed them with no risk to your own ratings. That's not really a system that we want to bring in as it would be damaging for the ladders.

And if you're talking about only these players only going against other people with "phantom ratings" to avoid damaging the ladders, then don't forget that we're working on bringing back skirmishes as well. These would cover the niche of players wanting to be able to have some fun games with others without any risk to their ratings. While we have no set date for when this is coming back, we'll let you know once we have the information. :)